An Apprenticeship
by initiation8
Summary: Shona McCullough works in a shop. She's no scientist. No adventurer. Her adventures are only ever on TV screens or in her dreams. Then the people from her dream turn up in real life. The Doctor, the skeleton man with the mad eyes, who takes her to see wonders in a box. And Clara Oswald, the impossible girl with her head in the clouds and the nebulae. She brings her down to Earth.
1. Chapter 1

AUTHOR'S NOTE: So the rumour is that Shona from the Christmas special could be becoming a new companion alongside Clara. And I know I'm not the only one who's been seeing a subtext between her and Clara. Anyway, whether or not Shona stays on, here's a fun little hypothetical exploring where she could go...

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><p>Shona pinged the cash register open and shut a few times to liven up another boring day. It was a Sunday, too. Sundays in particular always seemed to suck the life out of her life. At least she got to leave early.<p>

There was a song whizzing round and round in her head. That Christmas one by Slade. It'd been stuck there for weeks now, bringing all its festive fun well into January with her. Kept her spirits up through the rainy days.

Hmm. No one in the shop, five minutes from closing time...

Yeah, she could get away with it.

A quick dash to all that techie stuff in the back room, and the song was blaring out all through the shop.? She'd been told she danced like a dad, sometimes even _worse_ than a dad, but she'd never cared. She was too busy having fun.

So much fun, she didn't notice the two customers coming in, the tall skeletal one snooping around the shelves and the short cute one strutting about like she owned the shop. Not until the cute one bounced up to the counter and called her name: "Shona!"

Shona snapped out of her blissful boogie and stared at the woman in front of her. "How d'you know my name?" Her face, in addition to being cute, looked really familiar for some reason. Maybe she'd come in here before or something. Didn't feel like it, though... oh, yeah. "Name badge, I got a name badge, that's how you know my name. Forgot for a second there. Sorry!"

"Yeah, that, and..." Clara trailed off, the excitement on her face turning dimmer.

Hang on. Forget Clara knowing Shona's name. How come she suddenly knew Clara's?

Alright, this was really puzzling her. She had to know what was up here. "Do I know you from somewhere?" Shona asked.

"Well." Clara hesitated, head tilted, then whirled around to call her friend over: "Doctor! Look who I've found!"

Doctor? Hang on, she recognised him too! Skeleton in a magician's costume, that was him alright. Mind you, she still hadn't the foggiest how she knew him or Clara.

"Clara? Clara! Are you in danger?" The Scottish skeleton raced over and stared at her across the counter. "Are you endangering my friend? Oh..." He reeled back a little. "I know you. I know you, or you know me. Do I know you?"

"I know how you feel, mate," she muttered.

"Come on, Doctor," Clara said, irritated. It's Shona! From the dream! Remember?"

The Doctor squinted at Shona. All of a sudden those tremendous eyebrows shot up his face; he finally seemed to know what Clara was on about. And still leaving Shona clueless. "From the dream?" she thought out loud. Still staring at Clara, she kept trying on some level to place her face but mostly just got distracted by how nice that lipstick looked on her. Girl of her dream, huh?

Clara kept trying to break through: "We were going to hang out, weren't we? Oh, Shona, you can't have forgotten..."

"Yes, she very well can have," the Doctor corrected her. "Humans! How do you deal with the lack of memory? I have to keep..." (he waved his hand around his head a bit) "... _deleting_ things to free up space in mine, the human memory must be insufferable in comparison!"

"No! Shona, you-" Clara froze mid sentence. She looked up at the speaker on the ceiling, from which the song was still blaring. A smile dawned upon her eyes as she began to sing along:

"So here it is, Merry Christmas..."

"Everybody's having fun!" Shona joined in. "I know it's not Christmas any more, but that song has been stuck in my head for ages!"

"Oh, yes?" The Doctor bent down to look at her eye-to-eye. "Since when, exactly?"

"Since..." And finally she realised too. "Since the dream."

Clara smiled widely, dashed behind the counter and took Shona's hand. "Weren't we going to hang out? Have a curry?"

"Yes, but..." But it was a Sunday! For once, Sunday meant something good: "I get off early today! Like, now! Shall we have that curry?"

With that, Shona and Clara bounded off together.

"What about the-" Realising he was about to get left behind, the Doctor reluctantly sprinted after the two.

_Look to the future now. It's only just begun..._


	2. Chapter 2

AUTHOR'S RAMBLINGS: Cute time-traveller girlfriends! Cute time-traveller girlfriends! If I say it enough times, will that make it happen?

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><p>"Slow down! Where are you going? There was a really lovely curry place on the road just back there, we've gone past it now! No curry places down here."<p>

"We are going to one, just wait!" Clara shouted behind her, still running.

The Doctor was wheezing along behind Shona: "How does she keep up such a pace?"

"Do you know where she's going?" she asked him.

"Yes, yes, of course I do. But I think she wants to keep it a surprise. Now shut up because I can hardly breathe. God, I wish I had twice as many lungs as you lot instead of twice as many hearts..."

Eventually, thankfully, Clara did slow down. Where she slowed down was a street full of houses, with not a curry place in sight. There was, however, a big blue box.

"Is that a... phone box?" Shona peered up at the thing. "Never seen a phone box looking like that before."

Clara unlocked the door for her. The Doctor gestured at her to "go in, go in!" So Shona went into the funny-looking blue box and-

Whoa.

This was not a curry place. This was _bonkers_.

"How's there so much room? Is it some kind of dimensional thing?"

"It is exactly some kind of dimensional thing!" said a rather impressed Doctor. Yesss, she knew all those sci-fi movies would pay off someday! "Specifically, Time and Relative Dimensions In Space. TARDIS for short."

"Time?" Shona span around, taking in all the bizarre sciencey controls, the bookcases (weird, wouldn't they have brain download books or something in the future?), the blackboards with equation thingies scribbled all over them, the lights all over the walls, all the way up to the spinning circley things at the top. "So... is this a time machine?"

Clara grinned at her in excitement, then leapt up to the console, joining her friend there: "Doctor, where in the universe do they do the nicest curry?"

"Easy," the Doctor replied. He swung down a lever...

And the whole place vibrated with the roaring sound echoing about. Shona clung to a railing and felt the buzzing feeling within it, like it was alive.

It stopped.

"You going to open it?" asked Clara.

"Is it safe? Don't you have, like, scanners and stuff? To make sure it's alright out there? Is the atmosphere poisonous? Are there, like, Triffids around or something?"

"Triffids went extinct millions of years before your time," the Doctor assured her.

"Alright..." Still a little nervous, especially about the fact that Triffids were apparently a real thing, she nudged open the door.

Shona McCullough set foot on the soil of an alien world.


	3. Chapter 3

AUTHOR'S NONSENSE: God I hope Shona actually does end up a companion. That is all.

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><p>Shona prodded the curry with caution. "Is it meant to be purple?"<p>

"It's a delicacy!" the Doctor insisted. "Unique to this particular colony, to this particular decade. After this, they move onto hamburgers, and there's no way I'm taking you to then."

Shona swung back in the seed-pod seat suspended from the slime-covered ceiling. "It's weird," she said, peering at it as if a Triffid might come crawling out. "I'll give it a go, though..." Couldn't be worse than that slop Kumar down the road made. She dabbed a finger in the purple curry, then into her mouth - her eyes opened wide with how unexpectedly _good_ it was.

Clara laughed. "Enjoying it, then?"

"It tastes like... I don't know what it tastes like, but it's good!"

"Good!" said the Doctor, getting up. "I'll go to the market and get that bicarbonate of soda."

"Hang on, what?" Shona asked. "Bicarbonate of soda? You can't just leave us here, we're on an alien planet!"

The Doctor jumped out of the booth, saying as he left: "You'll be fine, Kraxos 5 is the safest planet in Andromeda!" And he was gone.

Shona stared into space a while, wondering out loud: "Bicarbonate of soda?"

"Oh! Yeah, I should probably explain that." Clara pulled a vial full of some liquid stuff from her jacket pocket. Looked kinda sparkly, but sparkling with darkness instead of light. Weird. "Someone poured this acid into a colony of sentient insects we were visiting. We managed to get most of it out before much damage could be done, but we need to neutralise what's left of it. So yeah. Bicarbonate of soda. That's what we visited your shop to get."

She was still staring. "You were in the middle of saving all these insects... and you stopped off to have a curry?"

"It's a time machine! Could pop off to the end of the universe in the middle of a date and be back in a few minutes' time. Which I've done before, funnily enough."

"A date?" Funny how today kept leaving even gobby Shona speechless.

"Hah, not with the Doctor, if that's what you're thinking! He'd be insufferable on a date, can you imagine?" Clara put on a Scottish accent: "Oh Clara! Here's some life-threatening danger, and by the way your hair looks lovely and brown today, have you been rolling in mud?" She laughed, and Shona couldn't help joining in.

Then the laughter trailed off, and Clara's smile closed up. "But yeah. That was with... someone else. Who I'm. Not dating any more. So that's all over now." She was trying to look steadily into Shona's eyes, expression neutral, but Shona couldn't help but see the traces of sadness behind that mask.

Subject change time? Subject change time.

"So you and the Doctor, you don't go on dates, you just travel round the universe and save insect colonies and get into life-threatening danger and stuff? That's just what you do?"

"Yeah," said Clara. "It's a full-time job, keeping that idiot out of trouble. Even if we can never manage to stay safe for lo-" A black-gloved hand clasped itself over her mouth; her eyes went wide with panic.

Shona was about to cry out for help, but the glove over her mouth stopped her from doing that. A glove with a bit of tissue hidden in the palm, covered with some sweet-smelling liquid that was making her feel all woozy...


	4. Chapter 4

AUTHOR'S CHATTER: This might be the last chapter in a while. I adore writing this fic and these characters, but like it or not school starts up again on Monday. I'll write what I can, though I know it's probably a better idea to be writing up one of the billion essays I really should have done by now.

Thanks a bunch to everyone who's followed/favourited/reviewed already! (Who _doesn't_ love Shona?)

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><p>She woke up in a web. Some stringy stuff that looked like spider silk was wound around her wrists and ankles, fastening her to the web behind her and keeping her hanging.<p>

Clara was hanging opposite her, just waking up too. She looked at her surroundings and sighed loudly in exasperation. "Can't ever just have a normal day out, can we?"

Shona looked down, which made her even more dizzy. A huge pit stretched down below them, so far she couldn't see the bottom. Nothing but a few strands of silk was stopping her from falling down there.

When she spoke, her voice was faint and hoarse. "I said I wanted to hang out, I didn't want this..."

Clara sounded similar. "Yeah, me neither. 'Safest planet in Andromeda'..."

"Because we keep it that way."

A holographic screen appeared between them, floating in mid-air. A man in a black suit, face covered by his eight multifaceted, shimmering spidery eyes, stared out at them both. He was flanked by two thugs in balaclavas, their pairs of human-looking eyes looking like they meant business.

"You have been deemed suspicious and are being held captive for the safety of all inhabitants of Kraxos 5. Your trial awaits shortly. Do not attempt to escape! "

The screen vanished.

"I hadn't even finished my curry," Shona lamented. "If the Doctor had been with us, then-"

"Then we'd probably still be trapped here, only with the Doctor as well." Clara sighed. "Don't attempt to escape, huh? Now that is just temptation."

"What, are we going to escape?"

"Hell yeah we are!" Clara looked at her, smirking as if she was about to try something dangerous. Then the smirk wavered a bit. "But we'll have to think up a way of escaping first. Can you see any way out of here?"

Shona turned her head around, peering through the gaps in the web behind her. "Uh, there's some lever thingy here. And a door, there's a door! It doesn't look like there's a lock on it."

"Of course there's no lock, no point in having one if we can't get out of these bloody webs!" She shook against her restraints in frustration. Nothing happened apart from the web bouncing back and forth a bit. "How much can you move, Shona?"

She wiggled her left wrist, her right wrist, her left ankle, her... "One of my ankles is a little loose!" She wiggled that a little more, bumping the web binding against the top of her shoe and loosening the laces each time. Good thing she was never any good at tying her shoes.

With another tug of her foot, the shoe came off and tumbled into the pit. Now she could take her sock-clad foot out entirely , maybe even reach the door handle with it. She could probably get space shoes or something anyway.

"Can you reach anything?" Clara called over.

Shona tried bouncing the web. No good: it would bounce back and forth but not up and down, meaning the door handle was out of reach. She could reach something else, though: "What d'you think this lever does?"

"No idea! Is there anything written on it?"

"Nope! Should I whack the thing down anyway and we'll see?"

"But what if that drops you into the pit?" Clara looked at Shona's free foot: "You don't want to be following your shoe down there!"

"I'll grab on!" she yelled. "To the lever or something, I don't know!"

"Are you sure that's safe?" Clara was looking at her like she was mad.

"No!" And with that, Shona swung the web and herself back far enough that she could bring her foot down on the lever and send it down. Just as it clunked into the off position, the webs around Shona's wrists and ankles unravelled to nothing and she fell, grabbing both hands onto the bottom of the web just in time.

She let out a laugh in relief. "I'm free!"

"Shona, you know that was _incredibly_ dangerous?"

"Yeah! Great fun too!"

Clara laughed. "That's the spirit!"

"Alright, your turn!" Shona climbed back up the web, one hand on the sticky silk after the other. She reached the top and turned her body around to face Clara: "I'm gonna jump!"

"Shona, what? No!" Too late: she was already bouncing herself back and forth on the web to build up momentum. As it came forward, she leapt forth, soaring across the empty air between them and clinging to whatever her hands found on the other side. This turned out to be a strand of web for her left hand and Clara's ankle for her right.

"Okay, that was even more dangerous. I don't think even I would have tried that." Clara sounded disapproving, but the smile on her face betrayed the truth.

"Good thing you've got me then!" Shona grinned back up to her. She climbed up this web, bringing her body through a big gap to be on the other side, then clutched the lever: "I'm gonna let you go now! Ready?"

"I s'pose so?" Even though she probably did things like this every day, she still sounded nervous.

Shona decided to do something about that. "Hang on to me!" she said, reaching up to take Clara's hand with her own free hand. She clasped it tight, no intention of letting go. "I'll count you in! Three... two..."

"One!" Clara's bindings disintegrated, and she swung her other arm round to grab onto the web. Still holding Shona's hand as if her life depended on it, she tried manoeuvring herself through a gap in the web to the other side.

"That'd probably be easier if you let go of my hand," Shona told her.

With a little reluctance, she did.

There was a door on Clara's side as well. Just as she'd predicted, it wasn't locked. Together, they left the room for good.


End file.
